However, Apple came up short versus revenue expectations in core product categories including the company’s iPhone business and services.
Apple shares fell about 1% in extended trading.
Here is how Apple did versus Refinitiv consensus estimates:
EPS $1.29 vs. $1.27 est.
Revenue. $90.15 billion vs. $88.90 billion estimated, up 8.1% year-over-year
iPhone revenue: $42.63 billion vs. $43.21 billion estimated, up 9.67% year-over-year
Mac revenue: $11.51 billion vs. $9.36 billion estimated, up 25.39% year-over-year
iPad revenue: $7.17 billion vs. $7.94 billion estimated, down 13.06% year-over-year
Other Products revenue: $9.65 billion vs. $9.17 billion estimated, up 9.85% year-over-year
Services revenue: $19.19 billion vs. $20.10 billion estimated, up 4.98% year-over-year
Gross margin: 42.3% vs. 42.1% estimated
Apple did not provide official guidance for its first fiscal quarter, which ends in December and contains Apple’s biggest sales season of the year. It hasn’t provided guidance since 2020, citing uncertainty.
Apple increased revenue by 8% during the quarter, and Apple CEO Tim Cook told CNBC that it would’ve grown “double-digits” if not for the strong dollar. Total sales in Apple’s fiscal 2022 were up 8% to $394.3 billion.
“The foreign exchange headwinds were over 600 basis points for the quarter,” Cook told CNBC’s Steve Kovach. “So it was significant. We would have grown in double digits without the foreign exchange headwinds.”
Cook told CNBC that Apple had slowed the pace of its hiring. Other tech companies are looking to make cuts ahead of a possible recession and as interest rates rise.
“We are hiring deliberately. And so we we’ve slowed the pace of hiring,” Cook said.
Although Apple’s iPhone business increased sales by over 9% on an annual basis, it came up short versus analyst expectations. Apple’s September quarter had 8 days of iPhone 14 sales, and analysts are closely looking for details about if Apple customers are trading up for more expensive models or if the new devices are poised to sustain higher sales through Apple’s fiscal 2023.
Cook indicated that Apple’s performance in phone sales was strong despite signs that other smartphone companies are struggling with a recent decrease in demand and said the company grew “switchers,” or people who bought an Apple phone after having an Android device. He added that the company’s high-end phones, the iPhone 14 Pro, were supply constrained.
“We clearly countered the industry trends on the on the phone if you look at third party estimates of what the smartphone industry did,” Cook said.
Apple’s services business also missed estimates.
Apple’s services business reported just under 5% growth during the quarter, a significant slowdown for the investor-favorite and profitable business line versus last quarter, which was 12%.
For the fiscal year, Apple services grew just over 14% to $78.13 billion, a slower rate of growth than 2021’s 16% annual increase, and much slower than 2020’s 27% services growth.
The business includes several different lines, including Apple’s online services like Apple Music and Apple TV+, revenue from the App Store, hardware warranties, and search deals with companies like Google.
Apple recently increased prices for Apple Music and Apple TV+, but the increases started during the December quarter.
Cook said the price increases were “disconnected” from Apple’s services performance.
“Well, they’re in the if you look at the price increases as an example, Music, the licensing cost has increased,” Cook said.
He added that Apple TV+ has more shows now, so Apple feels that the product is more valuable.
Investors generally like Apple’s move into services because the products are more profitable than Apple’s hardware and often bring in recurring revenue.
There were a few bright spots in Apple’s report. Mac sales were up over 25% to $11.51 billion, even as data points from parts suppliers, chipmakers, and competing PC firms were pointing during the quarter to a significant slowdown in laptop and desktop sales after two boom years during the pandemic.
Apple’s Other Products category, which includes Apple Watch and AirPods, also saw an annual increase and beat Wall Street expectations. Some analysts believed that Apple’s wearables were most likely to be hurt if recessionary fears slowed discretionary spending. That business increased nearly 10% year-over-year to $9.65 billion.
Apple’s iPad, which had been hampered by supply issues, decreased nearly 10% year-over-year and is Apple’s smallest individual line of business. The company recently released new models in October, which could boost sales just after the September quarter finished. Cook said that it was a difficult comparison because last year, Apple released new iPads in September.
The Motion Picture Association on Monday urged OpenAI to “take immediate and decisive action” against its new video creation model Sora 2, which is being used to produce content that it says is infringing on copyrighted media.
Following the Sora app’s rollout last week, users have been swarming the platform with AI-generated clips featuring characters from popular shows and brands.
“Since Sora 2’s release, videos that infringe our members’ films, shows, and characters have proliferated on OpenAI’s service and across social media,” MPA CEO Charles Rivkin said in a statement.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman clarified in a blog post that the company will give rightsholders “more granular control” over how their characters are used.
But Rivkin said that OpenAI “must acknowledge it remains their responsibility – not rightsholders’ – to prevent infringement on the Sora 2 service,” and that “well-established copyright law safeguards the rights of creators and applies here.”
OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment.
Concerns erupted immediately after Sora videos were created last week featuring everything from James Bond playing poker with Altman to body cam footage of cartoon character Mario evading the police.
Although OpenAI previously held an opt-out system, which placed the burden on studios to request that characters not appear on Sora, Altman’s follow-up blog post said the platform was changing to an opt-in model, suggesting that Sora would not allow the usage of copyrighted characters without permission.
However, Altman noted that the company may not be able to prevent all IP from being misused.
“There may be some edge cases of generations that get through that shouldn’t, and getting our stack to work well will take some iteration,” Altman wrote.
Copyright concerns have emerged as a major issue during the generative AI boom.
Disney and Universal sued AI image creator Midjourney in June, alleging that the company used and distributed AI-generated characters from their films and disregarded requests to stop. Disney also sent a cease-and-desist letter to AI startup Character.AI in September, warning the company to stop using its copyrighted characters without authorization.
Thoma Bravo co-founder Orlando Bravo said that valuations for artificial intelligence companies are “at a bubble,” comparing it to the dotcom era.
But one key difference in the market now, he said, is that large companies with “healthy balance sheets” are financing AI businesses.
Bravo’s private equity firm boasts more than $181 billion in assets under management as of June, and focuses on buying and selling enterprise tech companies, with a significant chunk of its portfolio invested in cybersecurity.
Bravo told CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” on Tuesday that investors can’t value a $50 million annual recurring revenue company at $10 billion.
“That company is going to have to produce a billion dollars in free cash flow to double an investor’s money, ultimately,” he said. “Even if the product is right, even if the market’s right, that’s a tall order, managerially.”
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OpenAI recently finalized a secondary share sale that would value the ChatGPT-maker at $500 billion. The company is projected to make $13 billion in revenue for 2025.
Nvidia recently said it would invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI, in part, to help the ChatGPT maker lease its chips and build out supercomputing facilities in the coming years.
Other public companies have soared on AI promises, with Palantir’s market cap climbing to $437 billion, putting it among the 20 most valuable publicly traded companies in the U.S., and AppLovin now worth $213 billion.
Even early-stage valuations are massive in AI, with Thinking Machines Lab notching a $12 billion valuation on a $2 billion seed round.
Despite the inflated numbers, Bravo emphasized that there’s a “big difference” between the dotcom collapse and the current landscape of AI.
“Now you have some really big companies and some big balance sheets and healthy balance sheets financing this activity, which is different than what happened roughly 25 years ago,” he said.
Oracle stock slipped 5% on Tuesday after a report from The Information that raised questions about the company’s plans to buy billions of Nvidia chips to rent as a cloud provider to clients like OpenAI.
Oracle had 14% gross margins on $900 million in sales in its Nvidia cloud business in the three months ending in August, according to the report, which cited internal documents. That’s significantly lower than Oracle’s overall gross margin of around 70%.
The report said that Oracle’s recent transformation into one of the most important cloud and artificial intelligence companies may run into profitability challenges because of how expensive Nvidia chips are and aggressive pricing on its AI chip rentals.
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In September, Oracle said that its backlog of cloud contracts, which it called remaining performance obligations, had jumped 359% in a year. It forecasted $144 billion in cloud infrastructure revenue in 2030, up from just over $10 billion in 2025.